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♪ From our studios, here is "NJ Spotlight News."

Briana: Good evening and welcome to a special edition of "NJ Spotlight News."

We are here at the planning and redevelopment conference in New Brunswick.

We are thrilled to do so for a conversation tonight with candidates who are vying to replace Governor Murphy in 2025.

We have a Republican state senator, the mayor of Newark, the mayor of Jersey City, and a former Republican Senate member.

Welcome to you all.

This conversation is being live-streamed on our YouTube channel.

We will continue on for an hour.

We will get into some different topics.

Affordable housing, protecting communities from flooding, and achieving statewide goals.

That is not an easy task.

I will be leading us through the conversation.

Welcome to all of you.

It is great to see you.

Let's jump in.

Let's talk a little bit about affordable housing.

Though doubt the state has a need.

Is there a crisis in terms of the cost to live here?

This is a very expensive state.

It costs a lot to own a home and to rent.

There is the Mount Laurel doctrine that has requirements set out as far as how much each town is required.

There are arguments to be made on both sides that there is a need but also that towns need help insuring they can accommodate what those needs are.

No doubt your time in the legislature you have heard from constituents to say this is a real challenge.

But this is the law of the land.

These are the guidelines in place.

How would you as governor help pounds plan for the affordable housing they are going to need?

>> First, I would simply not assign a number of units to a town.

That seems to be planning that resulted in litigation for the last 40 years.

I have a constitutional amendment that would take this away from the courts and put it in the legislature.

The legislature has ignored it over and over again.

People want to maintain their communities.

They want to feel as if the legislature is in charge, not the courts.

Clearly we need affordable housing.

But it should not be micromanaged by the courts.

In my judgment, the thing to do going forward is make sure that it is more affordable to live in the state.

One of the reasons housing is so expensive is the state government New Jersey is not affordable.

There has been very little effort by the legislature to reduce costs.

You have to look at the outside of the ledger as well.

It is extremely important that you put together real planners like the people in this room.

One thing they do not do in New Jersey is they very rarely look at the long-term issue.

Most of the time we are doing small things.

We need to concentrate on big things.

That is why we need the experts in this room.

They will all be in my administration.

Briana: The legislature did have an opportunity to ask for many years and it was in fits and starts.

That is why it ended up in the courts.

>> Republicans were not in charge of the legislature for the last 20 years.

There were many opportunities that never really happened.

You might have to ask your friends on the Democratic side of the legislature why these things were not on.

Briana: In your previous gubernatorial campaign, you had suggested a regional approach to this.

You said let's put a fee on developers and we will take that money and put it in a public trust and use the public trust to build affordable housing.

My question is that still your plan?

Who exactly would decide where the housing gets built?

>> We have a crisis that there is not enough housing, especially low and middle income people.

We also have a crisis where we are taking the garden out of the garden states by over developing our suburbs.

We are not incorporating all the planning.

We had one the most robust planning deferments in the state.

That does not mean there should be high density housing and every one of those towns.

Hillsboro is in the room.

It is a 52 square mile former cow pasture with one lane in each direction.

We have a Home Depot.

There are jobs there.

This is in a town were people have to get in their car.

We just added more cars to our roads.

That flies in the face of sustainability.

I find it hypocritical.

They are saying we have a sustainability problem.

This is a crisis that we faced.

We have to meet the affordable housing crisis.

Briana: Would it be a state body?

Local body?

Designated body that would decide?

How do you prevent that from becoming a backdoor way that the housing gets concentrated in poor communities?

>> With a governor who will take a lead in saying out loud all across the state, we have a crisis.

There is not enough affordable housing in the state.

That governor has to take the lead in putting forth a proposal that will meet constitutional mustard.

Briana: Confirmation from the legislature?

>> The governor has to take the lead.

No governor has taken a lead on this issue.

In putting forth a solution that works.

We need a regional approach.

Briana: Let me then use that to segue to you.

We hear about overdevelopment of higher density housing.

Overdevelopment is a criticism you faced as mayor.

As governor, how would you balance that concern with the court requirement?

>> Let me say thank you to all of you for taking some time to come out today and being passionate about the future of New Jersey.

In the introduction you mentioned I have been running for a year.

That is true.

The reason I started so early as we wanted to be substantive on policy and very detail oriented.

What you hear is the same soundbites around Democrats who control Trenton.

There is shared collective blame if you look at it this way.

Trenton has not moved on that.

You see NIMBY is him at the local level.

The obvious question is if you believe in affordable housing, which I believe the majority of people New Jersey do, but they get sucked into this vortex.

Most people believe that New Jersey should be affordable for everyone.

So how do you get there?

What type of policies?

Most people in New Jersey do not have visibility into what their municipality is doing.

Are they complying with obligations.

If most people understood and saw what their municipality was doing, they would feel a certain way about it instead of just having the squeaky wheel move the needle.

You need the carriage and the stick.

You need the states to see what you are doing.

If you are complying, you should be rewarded.

We build more housing than anybody.

You need the carrot and the stick to drive this.

It does not solve the problem.

>> Did you want to respond to that at all?

>> Chris Christie actually have plans that the Democratic legislature would not move on.

I don't know if it was against him or Democrats cannot make up their minds.

Regional planning, not town by town, is the only way to do this in a reasonable way.

Nobody plans like that.

There are plenty of places where you can put affordable housing.

Next to transportation.

The house available infrastructure.

The legislation did not act.

Briana: Let me move on.

Newark has a number of affordable housing programs.

It is an issue that is important to everyone.

500 people are live here in the audience for us.

There are criticisms from residence in Newark who say longtime residents and locals are still being pushed out.

Gentrification is a problem.

How would you as governor ensure that all three branches of government work together to deliver on these promises?

>> We are probably the only people appear that are actually building affordable housing.

We are building at a rate that is faster than the city is growing.

That is why we need state support and help Erie we need to understand how severe the problem is.

I don't think we understand that.

There are 300,000 residents of the State of New Jersey who are low income renters with three quarters of them burdened because they pay 50% of their income on housing.

About 11,000 people in this state right now are concentrated in five cities.

They have section eight vouchers in their hand.

This is a real crisis.

It is driving the cost of living up in the state of New Jersey.

There is a market.

For marketing.

That is why 90% of the rental units in places like Jersey City are above $2000.

There is a market for luxury housing.

If I lived in the suburbs and I go to school and college and get a great job, I can afford to buy a home in that community.

So I go to places like Newark or Jersey City or Hoboken.

There are thousands of people in this state to paint it into a house today who have the credit scores and the funding but the mortgage and the cost is too high for housing so they moved to Newark.

Briana: How would your administration make sure that everyone is working to get to those goals?

>> There are multiple things we need to do.

We need to create land trusts to make sure that areas that are affordable maintain affordability.

Put funding in place so people do not lose affordable housing.

They are not pushed out because rents are increasing.

There rents are stabilized.

When you build more housing across the state of New Jersey, you cannot just concentrate on development in certain cities.

That will not affect affordability and it of New Jersey.

You need housing navigators to go to this municipality and talk to folks about what land is available.

There was a study that showed that tens of thousands of acres of land in community is available.

In affluent, white communities.

Next to transit, no development in those communities.

There has not been any development there in the last 40 years.

Which means we can start bare.

There are areas of development that can happen.

Briana: That is a perfect segue for me.

You need transportation to get to and from your housing.

Funding New Jersey transit is a perennial issue.

We know it will get worse next year.

They are going to have a budget gap.

The governor has proposed a transit fee.

To create a dedicated revenue stream.

How many times have we all heard that phrase?

You supports this to fund transit.

But would you propose expanding services?

What would you expand and how would you pay for it?

>> Before I get to that, you did not allow me.

They took a lot of time.

I will take the same amount of time.

This is also about equity.

I don't want to leave this out.

We live in a region that is the most expensive and segregated region in the nation.

This housing crisis is not just about affordable housing.

It is also about inequity and segregation.

That is causing prices to go up.

We are actually paying a price for discrimination in the state of New Jersey.

[APPLAUSE] I agree with the corporate business tax the way that it was.

I think we should maintain at the way that it was.

The billions of dollars that arrays to corporate business taxes should be used to fund New Jersey transit so they can stop using the capital fund and use it for operating costs.

Briana: So you would bring that back?

>> I think it should remain the way it was.

All of this stuff is based on pressure put on folks by political organization sentences to send.

The corporate business community should pay for the transit.

It is a billion-dollar infrastructure.

It is unsustainable to working class people to pay a 15% increase to sustain an industry an institution that all of us benefit from.

Briana: Thank you.

You have set that you do believe there should be a dedicated source of funding New Jersey transit.

What do you propose that is?

Is it a corporate transit fee?

A corporate business tax?

Or something else.

>> During this past budget go around, a billion dollars spend night before the budget was passed was used in pet projects around the state.

My specially designated sores would be the last three years of spending money in districts in my judgment that were benefiting very few people.

This is what I am talking about.

Small ball versus big ball.

If that money had not been spent in the middle the night on pet projects, we would not be talking about a corporate business tax.

I will start by saying over the last five years we have seen those expenditures.

Now the question to a Republican candidate is, what are you going to do?

I would not have spent that money to begin with there and that would've been my source.

We obviously need to roll help in that regard.

These are major, major projects.

I have met with former governors on this project.

They always say, it is difficult.

We know how difficult it is to fix New Jersey transit.

We have to start by making sure we are not spending money willy-nilly around the state on small projects.

Briana: Let's give that question to your Republican colleague on the stage.

You said you know a dedicated source of undoing.

If you were in charge of the budget, what would you cut to pay for it?

>> The full pension payment for workers was $300 million.

Governor Murphy made it a priority.

Now it is fully funded with the annual contribution being nearly $7 billion.

He did that without a dedicated revenue stream.

It is called the New Jersey State budget.

This is all about setting priorities.

I am all about making New Jersey a better place to do business.

Building better jobs for everyone.

If there are better jobs for everyone, more people will use New Jersey transit.

In the business world, if you want more customers, you make the product dependable, safe, convenient.

People do not perceive New Jersey transit to be like that.

We have a corporate world where we put on an extra tax making New Jersey not regionally competitive.

I know the mayor loves when I talk about in Sylvania.

The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania.

[LAUGHTER] >> I missed the Choque.

That is the problem.

>> You got it.

You can explain it to me later.

The Democratic governor of Pennsylvania cut the corporate business tax in half.

Because he was competing with Ohio.

I am not about irresponsibly lowering taxes.

I am all about making New Jersey regionally competitive and a better place to do business.

It is all about setting priority.

How to Governor Murphy find $4 billion without a competitive revenue stream?

He made the pension payment a priority in his budget.

We needed governor to make mass transit systems a priority.

The European model puts all mass transit systems in the same active.

We have three major systems.

Put them all in the same bucket.

How much revenue do they collectively produce and what kind of state subsidy is necessary to balance the books and make sure that all three of them go so our economy works?

Briana: Let me wrap up this section.

With some news of the week.

The governor of New York indefinitely pausing New York City's congestion pricing plan.

You have proposed a regional plan or a plant that would told New Yorkers to come into New Jersey.

Is that something you would look to into your administration as a regional congestion plan?

>> Let me touch on the first part of that.

In Jersey City, we have more direct experience with mass transit than anyone in New Jersey.

We started the largest rideshare program.

We have a large bike share program.

Encouraging people with protected bike lanes.

We have gotten to ferry operations as well.

So we have a lot of familiarity with it.

The transit tax that you referenced earlier, the first place that was proposed was part of our campaign last August.

We talked about this regional approach to what the mayor of New York just did away with.

Where would we dedicate funds to help on transit?

It is a good question.

What you said earlier was entirely correct.

You should not have these midnight issues coming into the budget.

There needs to be transparency.

At the same time you have issues like a turnpike widening happening in Hudson County.

Those dollars should be put into mass transit.

Repositioning that stuff immediately should be a priority.

When you talk about the fees that were proposed by New York and the congestion pricing, we are a congested state.

I said that New Jersey needs to participate that in a way that can benefit from those dollars.

There needs to be a regional approach.

You cannot have a midtown Manhattan tax on New Jersey people.

At the end of the day, the transportation infrastructure is all intertwined here.

Briana: Is anybody else in favor of a regional agreement with New York?

>> I think New York and New Jersey, the governors should have gotten together and had a discussion about this early on with both agents used start talking about how to create a plan that dealt with environmental issues that people are concerned with.

And create the revenue necessary that people are looking for in both of those places.

We should not be widening highways or even bridges for that matter to create this kind of bottleneck in the tunnel that is not that wide.

All that money can be used for mass transit and it should be.

The priorities, I want to say something about the budget priorities.

When these guys were still down there, they cut the estate tax.

That could be used for housing and transportation and things like that.

The priority is to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

Briana: We will pick back up on that and a moment.

That will do it for us tonight.

Thank you to our friends at New Jersey future and the American planning Association for bringing all of the candidates together.

Thank you for this very candid discussion on very crucial topics for people in New Jersey.

For all of us, have a great evening.

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♪